Hi, I'm Raph.

I believe in putting the user firstProduct design is about solving human problems

I believe in makingI'm am as fluent pushing pixels as writing Javascript

I believe in the group mindBuilding teams, not just products

I've been designing for over a decade, although my path has taken fascinating detours through running a hip hop record label, helping private equity funds communicate their stories, running the 2010 Design Research Conference, making games, and performing improv six days a week in Chicago.

I got my Master of Design at the IIT Institute of Design, but my first education was in behavioral economics and psychology.

It all starts with people.

I work at Timeful, part of a team applying cutting edge machine learning and behavior science to a universal problem: making the most of your time.

Previously at Jawbone, I designed experiences across hardware and software to help people achieve their health goals.

This meant high fidelity UI / UX design work on the Jawbone UP app, product strategy defining features like the app's Smart Coach and building brand new tools to author the interactions of the recently launched UP3 and UP Move.

In 2012, at Massive Health, I designed an iPhone app to help improve people's eating habits.

As Lead Designer, I was responsible everything from product definition through to high fidelity UI and asset production.

Massive Health was acquired by Jawbone in December 2012

In 2011, I worked with Clarity Consulting & Intel to define the UX for a novel point of sale tool.

Point of sale staff have tools to interact with the store (inventory lookups, checkout), but we realized they were lacking a great tool to interact and collaborate with each other. I was responsible for the product definition and UX.

Intel - ASSIST by Clarity Consulting

Earlier that year, I designed and built Project Sketch, a prototype iPad app to teach visual communication.

I built it in HTML5 and node.js. This project was about getting to the root cause of people's difficulties learning to draw. I built dozens of paper prototypes and multiple digital prototypes to support a structured design process and discover this new approach.

Project Sketch

Nice drawing!

Players can like each other's work, creating a supportive environment.

In 2010, I built Flockjot to help design teams collaborate remotely.

I built it in HTML5 and node.js to solve the common design problem of organizing and clustering ideas. This was both an engineering challenge (as node.js was quite new at the time) and a design challenge as this involved deeply understanding the pain points of the design process.